05 February 2009

Memorial Day

Memorial Day draws an explicit parallel between Spring Break-y Girls Gone Wildry and Abu Ghraib. As such, it’s simplistic and smug, but also intermittently enthralling — much like Michel Haneke’s widely reviled Funny Games. This film’s first half is set in Ocean City, Maryland, during Memorial Day Weekend. While strip mall signage and FM radio announcers proclaim the dutiful importance of remembering and thanking those who sacrificed their lives for freedom and country, the American youth on display are consumed only with politically apathetic debauchery. Populated by a cast that makes Cloverfield’s twentysomethings look like desirable cocktail-party company, Memorial Day features crude, drunken depravity: characters hook up, strip, beat up homosexuals and engage in general misogyny (“if a bitch don’t give good head, I don’t want her”), all of it publicly performed for director and cameraman Josh Fox’s shaky handheld. It’s morally deplorable, truly reprehensible; in one scene, consensual, heterosexual sex in the backseat of a moving van filled with onlookers quickly turns into rape. “She’s telling you to stop — fucking go deeper,” one (male) observer encourages as the girl weeps.